Mary Shelley's Christian Monster

Robert M. Ryan

The Wordsworth Circle, 19:3 (Summer 1988), 150-55

{150} Frankenstein has always been suspected of being
subversive in its religious tendency, even when the precise
objectives of its hidden agenda were not clearly discerned.
Partly because of the dedication to Godwin, the novel's earliest
readers thought they detected immorality and impiety lurking
somewhere beneath the book's surface, and the notion has
persisted that there is something ambiguous or oblique, even
insidious, in the book's metaphysical disposition. The most
common suspicion has been that the novel was meant as a parody
of Genesis, mocking traditional belief in a benevolent Creator
(e.g., Walling, p. 42). A quite different suggestion came from
Leslie Tannenbaum in 1977 when he
argued that the novel's allusions to Paradise Lost work
ironically to point up Victor Frankenstein's failures as a
creator in contrast with Milton's more loving and
responsible Divinity.
Tannenbaum's interpretation was part of a general reassessment
of the novel's meaning carried out during the 1970s, principally
by feminist and psychoanalytic critics, who found in the novel a
subtle but insistent protest against some ideas and attitudes of
the author's father, William
Godwin, and of her husband, Godwin's disciple, Percy Bysshe Shelley. This
revisionist reading sees Victor Frankenstein as a composite of
Godwin and Shelley (and perhaps Byron as well), and the monster
-- the novel's most sympathetic character -- as a representation
of the author herself, the victim, to an extent the product, of
Godwinian theory and experimentation. And the novel is
therefore interpreted as asking how it is possible that a man
like Frankenstein (or like Shelley or Godwin), considered by
himself and others to be the benevolent benefactor of his
species, can somehow, with the best intentions and the highest
principles, bring misery and ruin upon those around him as the
result of his experiments with human life.1

Since Miltonic religion and Godwinian "philosophy" offer
radically antithetical views of human nature and destiny, one is
left wondering at which ideology the novel's satiric or parodic
intent is primarily directed. That Milton's system is employed to
show the inadequacies of Godwin's indicates one answer; that the
Miltonic faith is espoused by a homicidal freak suggests another.
The religious equivocality is, of course, only one aspect of a
larger pattern of ambivalence that has been detected in the
novel. The dedication to Godwin of a book now generally perceived
as embodying a protest against Godwin's kind of radicalism
suggests, as U. C. Knoepflmacher has observed, the "conflicting
emotions of allegiance and resentment" (p. 92) that always characterized
Mary Shelley's {151} relationship with her father. This conflict
is one way of accounting for the opposing tendencies detectable
in the novel's metaphysics. By making a monster the exponent of
the religious system that stood in radical ideological opposition
to her father's views, she set up a curious dialectic by which
she was able to call the Godwinian order into question without
distinctly affirming the Christian alternative, which functions
so ambiguously as to leave its validity in question. What I argue
here is that the ineffectual, baffled Christian faith of the
Monster -- the main victim and critic of benevolent philosophy in
Frankenstein -- is used by Mary Shelley to call into
question both Christianity itself and the ideology that Godwin
and Shelley were offering as an alternative to it.2

When one sets out to read Frankenstein in search of its
religious meaning, what is immediately striking is the total
absence of the supernatural as a functioning element in the
plot. Judith Wilt has called attention to the rich freight of
religious imagery and allusion the novel inherited from the
"God-haunted Gothic tradition" (p.
32), but on inspection these religious elements show
themselves to be purely decorative. One need only compare the
book with that other
great horror myth conceived in Geneva in 1816, which, as developed
in Bram Stoker's Dracula, depends so heavily on powerful
sacramentals and effective necromancy, to be reminded how bare
of supernatural machinery Frankenstein is. Indeed, the
very lack of religious resonance is one of the things that gives
Mary Shelley's story its peculiar horror. Neither God nor demon
has any role to play in this tale of human curiosity, pride, and
error, in which man has only himself to blame and fear. The
absence of the supernatural is not surprising in a novel
emanating from the Shelley circle. What is peculiar is
that on those occasions when traditional religion is introduced,
it is not subjected to the kind of criticism or ridicule one
might anticipate. On the contrary, Christian belief is almost
always depicted in a positive light. Practical concerns about
the novel's marketability would have encouraged discretion in
religious editorializing, but it would not account for, say, the
sympathetic treatment of Justine Moritz's Catholic faith, since
in English Gothic fiction Popery was always fair game. Justine's
religious beliefs and piety, reported uncritically by Victor
Frankenstein, are attractive enough to neutralize the negative
impression given by the priest who threatens her with "excommunication and hellfire"
for continuing to maintain her innocence. Her faith brings
consolation and serenity to "the
saintly sufferer" (Victor's phrase) as she awaits execution,
a serenity that is in striking contrast with Victor's own
paralyzing anxiety.

Although Victor Frankenstein's own religious views are never
clearly articulated, it is evident that he is not a Christian.
M. Krempe's joking remark that Victor "believed in Cornelius
Agrippa as firmly as in the gospel" (p. 68) serves only to remind us
of the absence of any other suggestion that he believed in the
gospel at all. In fact, although he refers to himself and
Elizabeth as children sent from heaven and periodically exclaims
"Great God!" -- and although he ransacks the Christian
maledictory tradition to find terms of abuse with which to
berate his creature, it becomes clear early on that Victor is
not even a theist in any traditional sense. The 1831 revision
allows him to indulge in some brief metaphysical meditations in
the ravine of Arve (Rieger, p.
248), where, like Shelley, he detects intimations of
Omnipotence, but in the 1818 edition, and as a general rule in
1831, he demonstrates a scientist's interest in proximate causes
rather than a philosopher's concern for ultimate ones. At the
same time, he is shown to have more than his quota of
superstition, such as his belief that various good and evil
agencies were struggling for control of his destiny (p. 45). This lack of a coherent
metaphysics may be blamed in part for his irresponsible creation
of a living being with so little forethought given to the
meaning or consequences of his act.

By contrast, his creature, from the beginning of his existence,
shows a strong metaphysical curiosity. He subjects himself early
on to a rigorous catechetical inquisition: "Who was I? What was
I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions
continually recurred," he says, "but I was unable to solve them"
(p. 128). The answers come to
him unexpectedly when he stumbles, by chance, upon a copy of
Paradise Lost. He receives the poem literally as a
revelation, "a true history" as he calls it (p. 129), not only of the events
recorded in Genesis but of
the subsequent unfolding of the divine redemptive plan and even
of the development of Christian doctrine as presented in
Michael's prophecy to Adam
in Book XII. Milton's epic
provides the Monster with an organized, identifiable set of
religious beliefs, a quite adequately orthodox creed.3 He becomes not
only a theist but what one has to call a Christian, since he
accepts as true the central tenets of the Christian faith. And
it is worth noting that his acceptance of Milton's religion is
not a case of vulgar superstition or credulous ignorance seduced
by the art of a persuasive poet. The Monster had already heard
the standard Enlightenment critique of Christianity earlier on
in the book, when he eavesdropped as Felix DeLacey read aloud
and offered "very minute explanations" of Volney's Ruins, which runs
through, in some detail, the long catalogue of Christian crime
and imposture (pp. 178-81).
When, therefore, the Monster accepts the religion of Paradise
Lost he does so having heard the worst of what was being
said against it in his time. He deliberately embraces the
Miltonic world-view in preference to the critical rationalism of
modern "philosophy," with which Mary Shelley has thus taken
pains to acquaint him.

The Monster's Christian concepts, attitudes, and language affect
significantly our assessment of him and also of the society that
rejects him. The director James
Whale saw this tendency in the novel and emphasized it when
in The Bride of
Frankenstein he depicted the Monster as a kind of
Christ-figure. While that was surely not Mary Shelley's intent,
the Christian frame of reference in which she placed the Monster
accounts for much of our sympathetic response to him. His
Christian beliefs and language do not estrange or {152}
gothicize him; on the contrary, they situate him in a familiar
universe in which the reader, even today, feels intellectually
more at home than in the uncharted ontological borderland that
Victor Frankenstein inhabits. In addition to providing him with
a history and a map of the cosmos (to guide his and our
perception of his place in the order of things), Milton equips
the Monster with an identifiable set of values, of ethical
norms, a standard of right and wrong to which he appeals with
fine rhetorical effect when hurling reproaches at his negligent
creator, reminding him over and over of the Christian duties of
charity and pity for the unfortunate, demanding as his due not
only justice (Godwin would give him that), but also clemency and
even affection, and promising in return mildness and docility.
Victor's own rhetorical borrowings from the Christian tradition,
by contrast, seem histrionic and factitious: "Fiend that thou
art!" he screams in a typical diatribe, "The tortures of hell
are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes. Wretched devil!" (p. 99).

It would not be a mere flippancy to say that the Monster is a
better Christian than Victor Frankenstein. Some approximation of
that perception contributes in an important way to our
assessment of him as a moral being. The ideal of "benevolence"
that Victor claims as his motivating principle and which is so
problematic in its fruits compares unfavorably with the
practical charity (to use a less enlightened, traditionally
Christian term) demonstrated in the Monster's humble, anonymous
services to the DeLacey family. The word "humble" suggests
another Christian virtue that one may justifiably claim for the
Monster. The new student of Paradise Lost seems to have
learned a lesson about man's place in the order of things that
makes him less likely than Victor to succumb to the sin of
hubris, or -- once again to use a more characteristically
Christian term -- the sin of pride. The Monster's humility is
revealed most clearly in an attitude that in 1816 was especially
characteristic of a Christian consciousness -- a sense of sin.
While his Christian beliefs do not prevent the Monster from
becoming a criminal, they do lead him to acknowledge his sins
(as he calls them) and the apparently sinful nature that has led
to their commission. The Monster's acceptance of moral
culpability is a refreshing contrast with Victor's nearly
invincible innocence. Frankenstein's unwillingness to admit to
any serious moral fault is one of the things that make him seem
less human than his creature. When the Monster is driven to
crime by frustration and rage, he does not justify himself
morally. He acknowledges his feelings of revenge and hatred to
be wrong and "hellish." Robert Walton calls him "Hypocritical
fiend!" but the Monster is not in the least a hypocrite. He
freely confesses what he calls "the frightful catalogue of my
sins" (pp. 220-21).

And yet, despite his willingness to confess and repent, there is
no religious consolation, and there can be no salvation for this
believer. The strangest aspect of the Monster's Christianity is
his realization that, although he accepts the truth of the
Christian faith, the faith is uniquely irrelevant to him.
Nowhere in Paradise Lost can he find any parallel for his
condition:

I often referred the several situations, as their similarity
struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no
link to any other being in existence; but his state was far
different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth
from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous,
guarded by the special care of his Creator; he was allowed to
converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior
nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone (p. 129).

And when he learns from Victor's notebooks the circumstances of
his own special creation, the contrast becomes even more
painful. He says to Victor:

God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own
image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even
from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow
devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and
abhorred (p. 130).

Only in fantasy can he live in Milton's cosmos and share its
joys and rewards.

I allowed my thoughts, unchecked by reason, to ramble in the
fields of Paradise, and dared to fancy amiable and loving
creatures sympathizing with my feelings and cheering my gloom;
their angelic countenances breathed smiles of consolation. But
it was all a dream; no Eve soothed my sorrows nor shared my
thoughts; I was alone. I remembered Adam's supplication to his
Creator. But where was mine? He had abandoned me, and in the
bitterness of my heart I cursed him (p. 131).

"Adam's supplication to his Creator" in Paradise Lost
includes the lines used as an epigraph to Frankenstein:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

The Maker's response to this protest is a decision to redeem man
by sacrificing himself. In striking contrast is Victor's
response to his own creature's complaint: "You reproach me with
your creation; come on, then, that I may extinguish the spark
which I so negligently bestowed" (p. 95). We are told in
scripture that God does not desire the death of the sinner, but
Victor from the beginning desires only the Monster's death.
Repentance, a change of heart, is never allowed as an option.
While one is conscious throughout the novel that the local
genius of Rousseau
presided over its conception in Switzerland, nothing is ever
said of that other Genevan
ghost, John Calvin. Yet as
often as the Monster's development brings Rousseau to mind, his
creator's response to him recalls the stern theology of the
reformer. The Monster is treated as a being who is totally depraved: "His soul is as
hellish as his form," says Victor, "full of treachery and
fiendlike malice" (pp.
198-99). Victor plays the role of punishing divinity despite
{153} the Monster's quiet reminder that Victor too is a creature
who had a creator. "You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I
gather from your fellow creatures, who owe me nothing?"

Thus cast out from human society, the Monster is more alone than
any being in the Miltonic order that he accepts as real. Having
been repudiated by his own creator, he has no relationship to
any other. He is metaphysically as well as physically a monster,
a surd in the theological system to which he subscribes. While
spiritual isolation is not uncommon in English Romantic literature,
Frankenstein's monster is unique in his peculiar ontological
loneliness. He resembles to some degree those other trapped
individuals driven to violence by a kind of religious
desperation, Byron's Cain and
Shelley's Beatrice Cenci. Cain
likewise can find no mental refuge in a Biblical milieu from
which there is no escape, and Beatrice is lost within a
religious power structure she has to accept as inevitable. Each
illustrates from his or her own experience the intolerability
rather than the invalidity of an orthodox religious system.
Their protest involves not heterodoxy so much as what one might
be etymologically tempted to call paradoxy -- a feeling that one
is somehow outside, set apart from, a religious system whose
truth one cannot deny. But the Monster's ontological plight is
even worse than that of Cain or Beatrice. Cain is repudiated by
a God who is acknowledged, even by Cain himself, to be a Supreme
Being and he is encouraged in his disaffection by yet another
powerful supernatural personage who assures him that if he is to
be damned he will have company in his eternal misery. Beatrice
can demand, if only rhetorically, vindication in the next world
from the same God that her executioners profess to worship. But
Frankenstein's creature has no reason to expect divine
protection or even attention; there is for him no mercy, no
redemption, no heavenly destiny. The most he expects after death
is that "My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will
not surely think thus" (p.
223). Victor Frankenstein is all the god he has, and the
Monster with a logical and desperate kind of piety prays to him
continually -- wrestling with him like Jacob or Job with their
own visions of God, but receiving neither blessing nor
insight.

At times Frankenstein seems as much a parody of Job as of
Genesis, and a comparison with the Old Testament drama serves to
illustrate further the Monster's anomalous religious status.
When he pleads with Victor, "Listen to me, and then if you can,
and if you will, destroy the work of your hands" (p. 96), one hears a distinct
echo of Chapter ten of Job, in which creature says to creator:

Is it good unto thee that thou shouldst oppress, that thou
shouldst despise the work of thine hands. . .?
Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about;
yet thou dost destroy me.
Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast made me as the clay;
and wilt thou bring me into dust again?
Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me
with bones and sinews. . . .

The Monster resembles Job in other ways too, such as his
inability to understand the reason for the suffering he has
endured even when still innocent of any offense. Like Job he
attempts to justify himself by defining a rational relationship
with his creator: "I am thy creature, and I will be even mild
and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perform
thy part, the which thou owest me" (p. 100). He is also like Job in
his inability to connect gratuitous suffering with the
supposedly benevolent God
revealed to him in Paradise lost, preserving his faith
intact despite his inability to understand. But the Monster's
intellectual dilemma is curiously more complicated than Job's
because he has to reckon with two different creators. In the
lower ontological context of the Monster's creation by Victor
Frankenstein, the creature's sufferings have not even an
educational value; they are no test of fortitude or faith; they
manifest neither his own virtues nor God's inscrutable
righteousness. While Job's Creator rejects all claims upon Him
by reason of His utter transcendence and mystery, the Monster's
human creator repudiates the claimant out of something more like
human self-righteousness and vanity. By contrast with Job's
confrontation with the whirlwind, the Monster's encounter with
his human creator only accentuates Victor's diminutive stature,
both physical and moral. Having tried humbling himself before
his creator and having experienced only rejection, the creature
inverts the Jobean archetype by threatening devastation upon his
vulnerable maker and all his household. The Monster finally
becomes a kind of existentialist criminal, driven to violence by
realization of the absurdity of his situation. It is as though
Job, taking his wife's advice, had agreed at last to curse his
Creator and die. The Monster's resemblance to Job finally serves
only to accentuate the difference between the two figures,
demonstrating again the creature's peculiar isolation from the
sublimities as well as the consolations of the Judaeo-Christian
religious tradition he accepts as true and from which he has so
strangely been precluded.

Why did Mary Shelley create this religious monster, this
disconnected Christian whose faith can bring no hope? The
question requires particular interest in light of the growing
critical consensus that the reader's sympathetic response to the
Monster is an effect of the author's own identification with
him. "Beneath the contorted visage of Frankenstein's creature,"
wrote U. C. Knoepflmacher, "lurks a timorous yet determined
female face" (p. 112). In the
Monster's spiritual isolation we see a projection of Mary
Shelley's own situation in the Godwinian milieu, living in an
ideological order whose validity she accepted but whose value,
at least for herself, she could not always clearly see. In
relation to this system she was in the paradoxical situation of
her monster with regard to Christianity -- subscribing
intellectually to its beliefs but feeling in a peculiar way
excluded from its proclaimed blessings and consolations.

More than one critic has seen in Frankenstein what Lee
Sterrenburg called a "subversion of all ideology" (p. 144) -- the result of a profound
if not completely articulate disenchantment {154} with the
actualization of her father's and her husband's moral ideals.
There was at this time large room for disenchantment with
"philosophy," "benevolence," and "virtue" as defined and
practiced in the Shelley family circle. Mary was hard at work on
Frankenstein in October of 1816 when Fanny Imlay (Mary's
half-sister) committed suicide, and Godwin, dreading unfavorable
publicity, refused to claim the body or acknowledge kinship and
allowed the girl to be buried anonymously in a pauper's grave.
Two months later came the suicide of Harriet Shelley, pregnant
with an illegitimate child, and Shelley's apparent inability to
accept responsibility or even express remorse for the fate of
his abandoned wife. One month afterward there was the birth of
Claire Clairmont's child by
Byron, a child dismissed with
apparent indifference by a father who refused any further
communication with the mother. Much of this strange behavior
Mary would have heard rationalized according to Godwinian
notions of moral pragmatism, the supremacy of the individual
conscience and the triumph of reason over emotion. After Fanny's
death, for example, when she wrote to console her father, his
cool pedagogical reply was: "I cannot but thank you for your
strong expressions of sympathy. I do not see however that
sympathy can be of any service to me" (qtd. in Locke, p.
273).

How, among these prophets of universal justice and benevolence,
could there be so much misery, and so much obduracy in response
to misery? If common sense suggested that something had gone
wrong with the Godwinian system, Mary would have found it
difficult to formulate or express an effective critical
response, living as she did in an intellectual milieu where
Godwinian theory was in control of the premises, where the ideas
and actions of her father and his disciples were, almost by
definition, morally unassailable. To question the system she
would have had to assume a position outside it, and in doing so
she would have found herself sharing strategic ideological
ground with other philosophical critics of Godwin. Most
obviously outside the Godwinian system, and most potently in
ideological opposition to it, was Christianity, which had
recently been offering metaphysical sanctuary to disaffected
radicals of the caliber of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. If her book was
meant as a subversion of Godwinian-Shelleyan ideology, it would
have been nicely subversive to make the victim of philosophic
experimentation a partisan of that Biblical faith to which her
father and husband were sworn ideological enemies. To have
enlisted the intellectual and cultural force of a Christian
ideology in which she did not believe as a weapon against
another which she was beginning to question was a brilliant
dialectical strategy, allowing her to challenge one system
without distinctly affirming the other -- since the other
appears, after all, only as the content of an epic poem naively
accepted as true by a creature who is not precisely human.

The positive treatment of Christianity in Frankenstein,
then, seems to have been more a matter of literary and political
strategy than of religious advocacy. All evidence indicates
that, while Mary Shelley was more inclined toward theism than
Godwin or Shelley, she would at this time have readily
subscribed to the critique of Christianity expressed, for
example, in the text and notes of Queen Mab -- agreeing
with Shelley that the Christian religion was dying and that, as
he put it, "Milton's poem alone will give permanency to the
remembrance of its absurdities" (Poetical Works, p. 821). But when she
herself selects Milton's poem as the vehicle of relevation to
the character with whom she most sympathizes, and when the novel
consistently points not to the absurdities and iniquities of
Christianity but to its more positive aspects, something
un-Shelleyan and un-Godwinian is going on. It appears that
Mary's own attitude to the Christian tradition was more
sophisticated, or at least more detached, in its ability to
acknowledge Christianity's cultural value without endorsing its
theology. Her Creature's Miltonic faith accounts for much that
is appealing, even beautiful, in his character; it clothes him
with a cultural identity and at times a moral dignity that makes
him more than a match for Victor Frankenstein in their
competition for the reader's sympathy. But as religion, the
Monster's Christianity is comfortless, ineffectual, and finally
pointless. It does not prevent his crimes; it cannot forgive his
sins; it cannot make him happy. If Mary Shelley was searching
for an alternative to Godwinism, her book suggests that the most
obvious alternative, Christianity, was not for her a viable one.
There is an element of pathos in her handling of this which may
suggest regret, or perhaps only nostalgia, for an older kind of
spiritual security that was no longer available. In her
Monster's strange metaphysical distress we can see a
representation of Mary Shelley's own uncertainty, anxiety, and
sense of isolation as she searched, independently, for a system
of belief and consolation adequate to her own needs and those of
the society at large.

Volney, C. F. C. de. The Ruins, or, A Survey of the
Revolutions of Empires (1792).

Walling, W. A. Mary Shelley (1972).

Weissman, J. "A Reading of
Frankenstein as the Complaint of a Political Wife."
Colby Library Quarterly 12 (1976), 171-80.

Wilt, J. "Frankenstein as Mystery
Play." In The Endurance of Frankenstein, pp. 31-48.

Notes

This paper was originally delivered at the 1987 Wordsworth
Summer Conference in Grasmere.

1. Scholars seem to credit Muriel Spark with
initiating this revisionary reading of the novel when she
suggested in a 1951 article in The Listener that
Frankenstein is a critique of Godwin's kind of rational
humanism. Harold Bloom and P. D. Fleck in the mid-sixties
developed Spark's insight into analyses of the novel as
embodying a negative attitude toward Shelleyan idealism and
Romantic Prometheanism in general, and in 1972 Christopher Small
contributed a book-length analysis of how Mary Shelley's
troubled relationships with her father and her husband found
expression in the novel. The direction pursued by feminist
critics in the seventies is suggested by the title of Judith
Weissman's article, "A Reading of Frankenstein as the
Complaint of a Political Wife." How quickly this revisionist
interpretation became critical commonplace is illustrated in
George Levine's collection The Endurance of Frankenstein
(1979), in which essay after essay takes for granted the polemic
against Mary Shelley's father and husband, disagreeing only as
to how deliberate or specific the criticism is.

2. For the purpose of my argument I will use
"Godwinian" and "Christian" to denote broadly conflicting
ideological systems. By "Christianity" I mean what Percy Shelley
meant by it in 1816, a term unspecific enough to comprehend
Romanism on the right and Socinianism on the left and to
describe the religion of Pardise Lost. I also use
"Godwinism" in a Shelleyan sense. In 1816 he could have been
described as more Godwinian than Godwin, since he used the first
edition of Political
Justice as his vade mecum although Godwin had moderated
some of his more radical views in later editions of the book.

3. I set aside as irrelevant here the question
of Milton's orthodoxy. The main source for our knowledge of his
Arianism and Materialism, the De Doctrina Christiana, was
not published until 1825, at which time orthodox readers were
astonished and dismayed to discover the heretical tendencies
they had not noticed in Paradise Lost. As wary a reader
as Dr. Johnson had declared the poem "untainted with any
heretical peculiarity of opinion" (Mineka, pp. 85-86).
Apparently Shelley also believed the poem to be an adequate
compendium of what Christians believed. See his note to Queen
Mab (Poetical Works, p. 821).